Our spring semester lineup of webinars for librarians kicks off on January 14. If you’re looking to expand your search skills, or just need a PsycINFO refresher, we hope you’ll join us! We offer two different one-hour sessions, both of which include live search demos. Continue reading
Category: For Librarians
Travel Award Accepting Applications Through March 31
Now through March 31, 2016, APA Librarian Conference Travel Award will be accepting applications for conferences taking place from May to August 2016.
The award is intended to help defray conference-related expenses for librarians with less than 15 years of experience after receiving their MLS. Three cash awards are distributed three times each calendar year, and the application cycle opens and closes on a rolling basis. At this time, we are not limiting the conferences that are eligible for travel award funding. Applicants should identify the conference that best meets their professional needs, and explain how attendance will support their current duties and future goals.
Please see the website for more details on eligibility, deadlines, and application materials. Questions about the APA Librarian Conference Travel Award should be directed to librariantravel@apa.org. Please help us spread the word by sharing this information with colleagues and friends who may be eligible!
PsycINFO Expert Tip: Grants & Sponsorships
Do you use the Grant/Sponsorship field in PsycINFO? This field displays the funding sources that the authors include in their acknowledgements. The Grant/Sponsorship field will capture data about grant funding, but you’ll also see information on fellowships, scholarships, departmental awards, and more – any type of funding source that the authors acknowledge. Take a look at the variety of funding acknowledged here:
The Grant/Sponsorship field from a PsycINFO record, shown here on APA PsycNET.
The Grant/Sponsorship field is divided into four sub-fields: Sponsor, Recipient, Grant Number, and Other Details. You’ll always see the Sponsor and Recipient sub-fields, even if the authors didn’t indicate who the sponsor was (though they almost always provide this information) or who was the named recipient of the funding. If the authors provide the grant number, we include that in a separate sub-field. Any other information about the funding source is added to the Other Details sub-field. This can run the gamut from the name of a scholarship to the name of a large-scale research initiative.
All four of these sub-fields may be searched by choosing the Grant/Sponsorship option. For example, try searching PsycINFO for your institution, or for a grant number (try KZCC-EW-103-2).
Searching PsycINFO, via APA PsycNET, for the grant number.
Why provide this information? It’s one more detail that we believe can be helpful in working with PsycINFO. Instructors can use the information to open a conversation about bias in research with their class; it can also be used as a source of ideas for researchers who are seeking funding, looking for collaborators, or want to find out if the funder was a government agency or commercial entity.
You won’t see the Grant/Sponsorship field on every record in PsycINFO, as we didn’t begin collecting this information until 2005. And of course, not everything indexed in the database includes funding acknowledgements.
Related Resources:
New on APA PsycNET: Translate the Interface
In late July, we rolled out the first language translation of the APA PsycNET interface – Brazilian Portuguese. Since then, we’ve been hard at work translating APA PsycNET into German, European Spanish, and French. These three options were added in mid-November, so you may have missed them!
You can now change the interface language on APA PsycNET to one of four options.
New Terms Added to the PsycINFO Thesaurus
By Ian Galloway, Senior Vocabulary Development Specialist
We recently released an update to The Thesaurus of Psychological Index Terms, the source of the controlled vocabulary used in indexing PsycINFO and the other APA databases. All of the items included in APA databases – journal articles, books and book chapters, dissertations, and more – are represented by a record that is indexed, or tagged, with Index Terms from the Thesaurus. This allows someone searching a database to quickly find all of the items about a particular concept, such as Affirmative Therapy, Playfulness, or Transactional Leadership, no matter what terminology the authors used.
Keywords, Index Terms, and PsycINFO Classification Codes from a record in the PsycARTICLES database.